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going crazy

I have a vacation home in Arizona that has an Rain-dial controller; my problem is that we will get a water bills that are driving us crazy by having sporadic high usage days. We may have a week or two that is good and then Bam, a day that uses 11,000 gallons in one day or does that for three days in a row. Last time I was there I reprogrammed the controller and made sure I didn't have any run times over lapping. I have one zone that runs the drip system and two others for the back yard grass areas. I think I've narrowed the issue to the sprinkler system and more specifically the drip area because we rent a room out so the house doesn't sit there vacant in between our visits and the roommate doesn't say the backyard sprinklers run for extended times.

I've replace the solenoids before but i'm thinking it may be the controller going crazy on us, could that be?

I am taking a few days off from work and going down there to fix it so any suggestions would be appreciated.

Info is a little limited but a few guesses.
How many gallons per hour does your drip zone use?
Usually these are low volume. 11,000 gallons per day /24 hours = 416 gallons per hour.
That's a lot through a drip system on one zone.
If you use any standard 1/2" drip line with 12' spacing then you would need between roughly 420 and 720 feet of line in the system to get 416 gph.
If you figure it doesn't really run 24 hours then that's a GREAT DEAL of water to say comes out of a drip system.
You would know. The tenant could walk that area and discover a marsh.

I'd expand my search a little.
The system could be running while the tenant isn't home.
Does the controller have more than one program available? Could it be running off program A and then doing the same thing on B?

thanks

thanks for the replies so far,

We go there once a month to visit the Grandkids and the last time we were there was the beginning of May. I checked for open lines and reprogrammed the system just to be sure. I've been calling the water company every Friday to get the daily water readings for the previous week and everything was normal except for one day when it ran for over 10K gallons. It did the same thing last month with the exception that it ran for 3 days like that. the normal usage for all three stations is about 250 gallons with the drip running for 25 minutes and each grass section running for 10 minutes. Not sure what the split is because as mentioned all stations run the same days and I don't have anything programmed in the B or C programs.

I was thinking I wouldn't see a marsh in the drip areas (about 11 or 12 drips) because I figured it just ran into that Arizona sand.

I'm sure that the sand loves that water so it wouldn't stay long.
But think about how much water we are discussing.
You jump from 250 gallons to 11,000.

Now, I've never been to that area so I may have some wrong ideas.
But if 11,000 gallons a day went out wouldn't there be some very healthy and happy growth out there somewhere?
And if it did go out in one day then that area would remain wet for at least that day.

You definitely have a strange problem.

What about the meter? Is it manually read?
Could your tenant take daily readings for a week or two and see if they match what the water company says?
Think of this: if you have a 3/4" meter, which is common, and if you run that into a 1" sch 40 pipe then max flow is around 13gpm. 11,000 /13 = 846 minutes = 14 hours of run time. And that is the water just flows straight out, not through any heads or drip lines. Something doesn't match.

Other grasping at straws questions: any work in your neighborhood, particularly near your house, that could explain?
Any chance a neighbor is 'borrowing' water? I found a system a couple of months ago where one zone was tied into the neighbors sprinkler system and using their water.